^ good input, Rase, but I disagree a little with the customization.

FFI, II, III, V, and essentially VI before it all let you make your characters and subsequently your party into anything you wanted them to be. The only real difference between VI and VII was that you had to wait for your limit bar to fill up in order to use their character-specific abilities, rather than being able to spam them every turn.

In VII, not every character is good at attacking and not every character is good at using magic. Cait Sith makes great use of materia like D.Blow due to his high luck (I think). With materia, you can make very character specific roles. It's basically the job system broken down into smaller pieces, and that's something I like about VII that it inherited from the classic FF's, something which alot of American fans who never played the Japanese releases get confused about.